


Painted with fair colours

by adnauseam



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: 17th Century, Alternate Universe - Historical, F/F, Witch Hunts
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-01
Updated: 2019-05-01
Packaged: 2020-01-13 06:58:37
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,649
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18463831
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/adnauseam/pseuds/adnauseam
Summary: On a fine May morning, Ginevra Weasley and Luna Lovegood turn their backs on the village and walk into the mouth of hell.





	Painted with fair colours

**Author's Note:**

> Title from _Malleus Maleficarum_. ‘What else is woman but a foe to friendship, an unescapable punishment, a necessary evil, a natural temptation, a desirable calamity, a domestic danger, a delectable detriment, an evil of nature, painted with fair colours!’

 

 

At the very edge of the field they pause. From here the ground slopes downward at a strange, smooth angle, coated with dandelions and daisies and a few deep bluebells in their mourning bow at the margin, where yew and ash mingle. Distantly, Ginny thinks she can hear swine rustling in the undergrowth. Below them they can now see the stream, ruffled white, low and shining. Two moorhens are waddling about in the shallows. When Ginny glances sideways at Luna, Luna is already looking at her steadily.

So down the bank they go, ankles catching the wet of the grass, and beside the stream they walk on the soft ground without talking. There is little reason to talk. At some point there was a slip or a twitch, and then Luna had seemed always to be with her, in person or not. They have a way of slipping in and out of each other’s minds. So very often when she is mending with her mother by the fire, she can feel some impression of Luna kneeling in the shadowy cool recesses of her mind. And so now they walk, the only noise the river and the sigh of the woods, and the whish-whish of the coarse material covering their shoulders brushing.

With the monotonous beat of their steps, her mind plods forward, thinking with anticipation of the maw of the cave. The mud smeared on the bank besides its entrance; the downturned grimace of that smile cut into the rock. What lies beyond is unimaginable. In the village it’s common knowledge that the cave leads down to Hell, that it’s the Devil’s own mouth. Ginny was once been dared to take three steps into it by Fred, but not further. It was unholy dark in there. A new moon night with the stars ripped away. It slopes downwards at a frightening rate: walking even three paces in was like falling, though she had pretended not to be unnerved to prevent George’s chortles. And faced with that blank cliff of imagination, with all possible ideas sliding right off it, and yet her mind still moving rhythmically with her feet, Ginny turns instead to her memories.

She thinks of her own small cottage, bursting to the seams with brothers, faces streaked with grime and mischief. Percy so insistent, huddled in the corner, pouring over pages of scripture, determined to find some other way out. Her mother. Luna bent over flowers, picking herbs, her eyes very wide and shrewd. There is a knowing in them always that Ginny is helpless against, defenceless. And then on the very edge of her mind, their fellow villagers, with their malice bright eyes and whispering mouths. And that image is enough to grow a small panic in the heart of her throat.

But Luna takes her hand, and the memories strip away at the seams.

Dirt has always seemed to fall away in Luna’s presence, all the horrid muddy memories: the Baron’s face flabby and hating on horseback down the lane; her father’s hands jittering so unnaturally that he had dropped his pen; her mother’s face full of impassable knowledge; money draining away and the fear of it all – oh; blood dripping down from between her legs into soil for the worms to gorge themselves on, her own gasps so harsh in the black air; unshed tears festering beneath her tongue; the sun peeling the skin off her shoulders; Bill sick with fever but lacking any breath to heave with or salt to spare for tears; the mutterings in the village squirming down her ears, bile leaching into her brain and twisting it. Determination no defence against whispers. But whenever Luna looks at her, all of that is washed away, her skin clean again, the world brighter, full of the scent of rosemary and mint and strawberries.

She realises that she is gripping Luna’s hand painfully hard and forces herself to think of prettier things. Luna knelt on the grass with faraway eyes and her arms brimming with goldilocks, hyssop, daisies, wormwood, lovage, meadow-wort, soapweed, damask-violet…

It had been a lilting, terrifying summer, a short-breathed autumn, and an exalted winter; every day much the same: feeding the pigs and staring out across the coarse field, beating their clothes, sprinting lightly towards the village, slowing to a walk with a coin in her hand, sewing by firelight, taking the long way back home from church to walk past the apothecary garden, sprawling beside Luna on the grass, sitting on the old wall by the river, swinging their feet and watching for hares, standing in the meadow beyond the copse silent and still, not quite cold enough to shiver, waiting for the moon to swing above the treeline and hang amongst the stars, meandering back to her disintegrated rotting bare-shouldered corpse of a home with contentment liquid low in her stomach.

Catching Michael’s eye in church.

But still, that had been enough, more than enough for a time. Luna did not repeat the village rumours, instead inventing her own, private rumours far funnier than anything Ginny had ever heard in the village, private rumours just for the two of them.

And that had been enough, more than enough, for almost a year, this secret way of getting back at them all, until the whispers reached a cacophony in an unclouded May and the Witchfinder General came with a black cloak, intent, fanatical eyes, and a purse stuffed full of slaughter. When Ginny had looked at him, she could feel again the hot crimson of blood snaking down the inside of her leg, so red, so _red_ against her calf, turning to brown on the bare earth, but so red against her skin, so _red_ —

And when Luna had glanced at her, looking up from her herbs on the path home, she fancied, stumbling, that Luna must be able to see the crimson staining her skin too, that Luna could not heal this terror like she healed wounds or misery.

Sitting in the church knelt in uncomfort with everybody around her praying and thinking very little herself but growing animal terror and Luna conspicuously absent and – most of all – the chittering of bats and pigeons and doves in the eaves. And it had felt to her that the bats – which she couldn’t see, could only hear – were flittering in and out of her ears, whirling and whirling and whirling.

She had set her jaw and gone about her usual business grimly. Bats in the eaves and a mild bright sun. With every step she took on the shit-stricken path that sliced the village open she seemed to lurch yet the earth moved with her; she fell downwards with every motion and was caught each time, and whether it was her own nature that disallowed her to break or some other great and powerful thing she was not sure. She had wanted to break down, to cry and scream, but could not, could only get on with things. She had wanted to run away. She did not run away. She wanted to run away.

It was in the middle of some desperately banal conversation that Luna broke out with it and a great exhilarating wall of calm overcame her. She met Luna’s eyes. It was like the fabricated private rumours once again. _Theirs._ Absolutely and inexorably theirs. Her shoulders had firmed, and when she caught Luna staring at them, she grinned. The skin waiting beneath her toenails was tingling. That night she dreamt of flying, triumphant.

And so in the morning she had crept out of the house into the silvery dawn. And now they’re here, walking beside the river, slowing to a standstill. Looking up at it.

Luna squeezes her hand.

Ginny waits while Luna took her two candles out of the misshapen bundle at her back. The harder she stares at the opening, the blacker it seems. She takes the candle offered without looking, mesmerised, and lights it without thought. They stoop and tread firmly into the cave; their boots sinking into the slimy riverside cave. The roof lowers until their knees are nearly touching the mud, and just as Ginny starts to feel that she will have to back out, run away, the ground starts to slope steeply downward and there is room to straighten out.

Shadows slide jagged over the walls of the cave and flicker with the candle. The light does not reach the ceiling or the floor and it barely reaches the walls. Distantly there’s a drip-drip-drip of water on mud. Luna takes her hand again, wondrously cool and long fingered. And they walk on, each move like falling, insecure on the slip of the mud.

Growing within her with every step is a faint feeling that she recognises but cannot place; something that she remembers feeling but has since lost. It tingles in her toes and wobbles its way up her legs to her throat; breathing is suddenly euphoric. She thinks it’s excitement, or perhaps adventure.

She brushes her hand against the rock and imagines it red, imagines the visceral dirt of it under her fingernails. Underneath their feet the soil is turning to sly, slanting stone.

It’s quiet enough for the scuffling noise of their footsteps and their breathing to be swallowed up by the darkness; every noise they make becomes part of this vast ocean of nothing, of serenity. They move like ghosts into the earth.

Descending into further and further absolute blackness, further and further and further until the sensation of Luna’s hand in hers felt unreal. Further and further, deeper and deeper, down into the maw of the earth, the slick muddy core all around them, the air so clear and clean and pure to breathe, space opening out around them. Further and further and further and further downwards they go and with every step Ginny is lighter, lighter.

 


End file.
